De-Inflection Software?
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Sat Sep 21 11:50:05 EDT 2002
At 11:55 PM -0400 9/20/02, George Somsel <Polycarp66 at aol.com> wrote:
>Forwarded for>:
>
>>In a message dated 9/20/2002 6:31:11 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>>rstauch at charter.net writes:
>>
>>>I wonder if anyone has ever seen software written to take a word in
>>>Greek and examine it for its constituent parts, prefix-stem-suffix? Is
>>>there any such software written? I don't remember ever seeing anything
>>>like that, but I might not be looking in the right places.
>>>
>>>I think it might be relatively easy to write such software. It would be
>>>a matter of determining what tables to include and how to modify words
>>>given to find the possibilities. Debugging might take a lot of time,
>>>though.
>>>
>>>Would there be much of a market for such software? It could go both
>>>ways, and allow one to enter a stem, for which it would produce an
>>>inflection table, or one could enter a word found in a certain text and
>>>it would tell you the part of speech, its inflectional form, and other
>>>facts (like, if it is a verb form of a noun, a compound word, and all
>>>that).
>>>
>>>I can imagine such software for other languages, too. It could use the
>>>same basic engine, but with different rules, tables and fonts.
>>>
>>>Frankly, I am tired of looking up words, not knowing if I have an adverb
>>>or verb in hand, wasting time finding out it's not at all what I thought
>>>it was. Of course, by the time I would be through writing such software,
>>>I wouldn't have that problem any more. ;)
>>>
>>
>>I'm reminded of an old TV add for Smith-Barney by John Houseman. "We make
>>money the old fashioned way. We earn it." I would suggest that the best
>>way would be "We do Greek the old fashioned way. We learn it."
I really have to agree with this; I think it would be relatively easy to
construct such a program, and in fact, there's just such a parsing
instrument for Greek and Latin texts at the Perseus web-site:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/PR/search.ann.html
but (a) I cannot imagine why anyone should want to work through a Greek
narrative or expository or even poetic text using such a tool every two or
three or even every seven or eight words--lemmatize the word to determine
its endings and infixes, then look up the word in a lexicon; (b) one never
learns to read that way: what must ultimately be gotten is instantaneous
recognition of endings and infixes and their associated implicit meanings;
there are far too many out there even now who rely upon parsing guides to
piece out the elements of GNT sentences and haven't yet come to terms with
the basic recurrent syntactic structures and nuanced idiomatic usages that
are essential to the way a language communicates meaning.
--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
Most months:: 1647 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu OR cwconrad at ioa.com
WWW: http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~cwconrad/
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